


Tattoo

by orphan_account



Series: JayTim Week 2016 Entries [1]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics)
Genre: Domestic Bliss, JayTim Week 2016, M/M, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 16:59:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7649083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First entry for JayTim Week 2016. </p><p>Jason gets tattoos.</p><p>Check the series for the premise (JayTim Week 2016 Entries).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tattoo

Jason gets his first tattoo two months into their relationship. They’re living in an apartment in France, trying to think of a place to move next in order to keep up their chances of a successful getaway. He comes home one day with a bandage on his arm and few words of explanation. It takes Tim two days to draw it out of him, at which point he collapses onto the couch with his head in Tim’s lap and buries his nose into Tim’s thigh. He breathes deep. Tim waits. 

“I wanted to get rid of them,” Jason says slowly, painfully, “but I can’t. There’s too many. So I covered some up.”

He draws the bandage up and Tim gets to see his first glimpse of a black and white skull with flames for eyes. It’s something of a cliché, likely pulled off the example wall seconds before the act. Tim swallows, considers his next words carefully. 

“It’s okay, Jay.” He cards gentle fingers through Jason’s hair. “You can do that if you want, but you don’t have to. Not for me. Not ever.”

Jason swallows hard. His eyes are welling dangerously. 

Tim lets the silence sit until Jason is ready to speak again.

“I don’t know,” he says. Tim nods. 

“That’s okay.” He raises Jason’s hand, careful not to pull at the affected area, and presses a gentle kiss to his knuckles. 

“Whatever will make you feel better, it’s okay.”

Jason doesn’t answer.

They stay like that for a while.

***

Jason gets more tattoos, to cover up more of the scars. 

A rose stem with thorns circles his left wrist. A lightning bolt with thick lines crisscrosses down his side. A snake curls tightly just above his right elbow. 

Some of them have stories, meanings. Some do not. 

Jason likes having art on his skin. It makes him feel important, in a way. Like he has significance beyond having to earn it for himself. There’s artwork on him, that will stay with him no matter what. It’s a comforting thought. 

He’s so tired of thinking he isn’t worth anything. 

Sebastian loves them as well, perhaps a little too much. He latches on sometimes and drools on them until Jason thinks he may never be clean again. Tim only laughs at him and refuses to help. 

Eventually Jason can’t bring himself to mind. If the awed expression on Tim’s kid’s face is anything to go by, he is now very fascinated with Jason. It’s a sense of validation that he didn’t really know he needed. So Jason picks him up and puts his head to his shoulder and listens to Sebastian coo as he traces the lines of a key with small fingers (the lock is on the back of his neck). Tim watches them with warm eyes. 

Jason feels a little more centred. It feels good. 

***

Tim suggests that they get matching ones. Jason smiles into the crook of Tim’s neck and suggests a pair of stormtrooper helmets. Tim does think it over before he vetoes it. 

They each get a full coloured tattoo of a bluebird’s wing on their shoulder blades. Jason on the left and Tim on the right. 

Jason has never loved him more. 

***

He does get a stormtrooper helmet. A small one on his left ankle. 

Tim talks him out of the phrase “Han shot first”. 

***

When Tim comes home to his boyfriend and five-year-old late at night after a long day of work, he expects to find them asleep. He finds them in the living room, curled up by the foot of the couch, Sebastian’s head on Jason’s chest and coloured markers all over the floor around them. Tim shakes his head fondly. 

He kneels on the floor and attempts to coax his son’s limp form off his boyfriend, only to find something surprising when he lifts his arms out of the way. Jason’s arm lies sprawled out to cushion the bits of child spilling off him, and Tim has a good view in the dim room of his tattoos. Good enough to see the half-finished job of colouring them in which definitely had nothing to do with the original design. Jason’s sunflower has a red tint to its leaves that is surprisingly neat for the motor skills Tim sees in his son. The skull next to it is a happy lime green colour. 

Tim has a hard time holding in his laughter as he hauls Sebastian the rest of the way up. He stows him away in his bedroom and closes the door so as to not wake him before gently shaking his boyfriend awake. 

Jason smiles blearily at him. Tim shakes his head. 

“Can I convince you not to do that anymore or will we have to get some non-toxic ones?”

Jason grins. It makes Tim smile. 

“You’re just jealous,” Jason mutters, and pulls him down by the arms for a kiss. 

***

When Sebastian is ten, Jason gets two clusters of stars on his hands which cover both the fronts and the backs of them. They connect to a larger piece which runs up his left inner forearm, making Jason look properly like a galactic map. Tim adores them. Sebastian quickly finds a use for them. 

He sits for hours sometimes and plays connect the dots with his father as the puzzle. It’s relaxing to them both, and Tim can see the way it bonds them together. It continues long into Sebastian’s teen years, and some days Tim can come home to see Jason and Sebastian tracing lines with ink pens on Jason’s arm and talking about anything Sebastian needs to.

When their fifteen-year-old son returns home from school with a suspicious-looking black eye and an attitude to rival Jason’s, Jason simply sits him down in the living room and asks him to find Ursa Major again. Only once Sebastian has managed do they bring up the day he’s had. By that time he’s relaxed a little, and Jason can get a proper answer out of him. 

Tim watches them from the kitchen island. He idly thinks about TTK and how Sebastian must have been really distracted for such damage to come to him. He can’t maintain the field as reliably as Kon did, doesn’t have the instincts for it. He also thinks about what his life would have been without Jason coming into it to make sense of it for him. If he hadn’t, Tim isn’t sure what would have happened to him and his son. 

He might have given him away. He was considering it when Jason first appeared in his camera feed. He was terrified, worried and confused, and he had a child who looked like the face of everything he felt he had lost. 

Now that child sits in his favourite chair tracing lines he knows by heart with one of Tim’s non-toxic pens, and Tim can’t imagine his life being any better. Sebastian glances up at him and smiles softly, and Tim smiles back. He no longer feels the suffocating squeeze in his chest that is the loss of Kon, of Bart and his family. The pain has faded to an ache, and finally to acceptance. 

He picks another mug out of the sink to dry. His son and husband continue to talk in the background. 


End file.
